Cal Poly Humboldt
AC-9: Research and Scholarship

See attachment.

To assemble a full data set, a student assistant supervised by the Sustainability Office reviewed an inventory listing all grant funded projects from Sponsored Programs. Sponsored Programs is the entity on campus who facilitates funding incoming to the university for all purposes, which is inclusive of dollars coming in to support research projects conducted by academic faculty. The original inventory was filtered to eliminate years prior or outside of the reporting timeframe, removed non-academic departments, and tagged projects not deemed to be research (these would ultimately stay in the attached inventory but corresponding principal investigators and departments for those projects not deemed to be "research" were not counted in the totals reported for this credit). Then the student assistant reviewed supporting documents to gather a one sentence description of each project. Based on this description, and sometimes additional project documents, sustainability research was identified by determining whether at least two of the three dimensions of sustainability were being examined in the research or the research questions. Projects in which interrelationships between two of the three dimensions of sustainability were designated as sustainability related; projects in which interrelationships between all three of the dimensions of sustainability were examined were designated as sustainability focused. This was the same methodology used to designate courses. (The dimensions of sustainability are economy, society, and environment). Staff from Sponsored Programs reviewed initial findings and modified them accordingly. Sustainability permanent staff reviewed all results and formatted them for attachment and upload here.

The raw data that was compiled and reviewed for this credit came from Kacie Flynn in Sponsored Programs Foundation (SPF). Student assistant Karly Johnson queried SPF drives, folders, and files for project descriptions and did the initial analysis to determine which projects met sustainability criteria. Pia Gabriel was the staff representative from SPF that reviewed initial findings. Katie Koscielak reviewed all results and completed the final numbers and upload here.

The denominator figure used here for 'Total number of employees that conduct research' came from Gay Hylton and is reflective of the total number of tenured faculty at the time of the report. This figure is significantly different from the way it was calculated in prior years because in this iteration of the report we have refined our method to more closely follow Technical Manual specifications of "The total number of employees that conduct research must include, at minimum, all academic staff for whom research is considered in promotion and/or tenure decisions." In prior reports we used a figure representative of only academic researchers conducting "grant funded" research, since this was our only reliable way of tracking research at the campus. The prior method yielded a smaller number and therefore inflated our performance on this credit. Reporting the total number of tenure track faculty in this current iteration seems to be more in alignment with STARS criteria and parameters, even if not all of these folx routinely complete research and/or despite the fact that if they conduct non-grant funded research, there is no existing method for capturing and documenting it in STARS. Viewers will notice that the total number of researchers included in the attachment is 82, which indicates the number of academic faculty researchers who conducted grant funded research in the reporting period.

Similarly, the total number of departments reported here is reflective of the number of departments from which the total number of tenure track faculty 235 come from (not all departments have tenure track faculty). In the attachment, the figure is lower at 19 because that is reflective of the total number of departments that conducted grant funded research within the reporting period.